Introduction

In the preceding chapters, I have shown how the formal resources of declarative grammar can be applied to the description of various phonological phenomena. As in other approaches to phonological theory, the success of the declarative approach to phonology was evaluated by a consideration of particular, partial analysis of fragments of several unrelated languages. In this chapter and the next, I shall illustrate the utility and coherence of the declarative approach by presenting and defending more complete (lexical) phonological analyses of the two unrelated languages, Japanese and English, which have been a focus for discussion and exemplification in earlier chapters. For both of these languages I shall present similar grammars of phonological structures up to the level of the word. In each case I shall discuss the phonological oppositions employed in those languages, the various types of features, the well-formed feature-structures and the phonological constituent structures. For the Japanese fragment, the systems of phonological oppositions were discussed in chapter 3 above. Consequently, this chapter attends in particular to the development of a phrase-structure grammar of the structures in which those systems are brought together. For the English fragment, presented in chapter 7, both systems and structures are described in detail. The grammar of English phonological structure has been implemented as part of a computer program for text-to-speech synthesis (Coleman 1991), and has consequently been tested for consistency and completeness more rigorously than the Japanese grammar.